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Reading Literature in a

Global Age

The Deliverance of Others

David Palumbo-Liu

David Palumbo-Liu

The Deliverance of Others

Reading Literature in a Global Age

Duke University Press Durham and London 2012

∫ 2012 Duke University PressAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of Americaon acid-free paper $Designed by C. H. WestmorelandTypeset in Arno Pro with Candara displayby Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataPalumbo-Liu, David.The deliverance of others : reading literaturein a global age / David Palumbo-Liu.p. cm.Includes bibliographical references and index.isbn 978-0-8223-5250-1 (cloth : alk. paper)isbn 978-0-8223-5269-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Literature and globalization. 2. Other (Philosophy) inliterature. 3. Intercultural communication in literature.I. Title.pn56.g55p35 2012809.%93355—dc23 2012011575

Portions of this book have appeared previously: partof chapter 1 appeared as ‘‘Rationality, Realism and thePoetics of Otherness: Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello,’’ inMary Gallagher, ed., World Writing: Poetics, Ethics andGlobalization (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,2008, 190–206); the discussion of Jean-Luc Nancy inchapter 3 is excerpted from ‘‘The Operative Heart: OnJean-Luc Nancy’s L’intrus,’’ New Centennial Review 2.3 (fall2002): 87–108; and part of the discussion of Ruth Ozeki’snovel in chapter 4 is taken from ‘‘Rational and Irrational:Narrative in an Age of Globalization,’’ in FrançoiseLionnet and Shu-mei Shih, eds., Minor Transnationalisms(Durham: Duke University Press, 2005, 41–72).

Contents

Preface vii

Acknowledgments xiii

Introduction 1

1. When Otherness Overcomes Reason 27

2. Whose Story Is It? 67

3. Art: A Foreign Exchange 96

4. Pacific Oceanic Feeling: Affect, Otherness, Mediation 133

Conclusion 179

Notes 197

Bibliography 207

Index 215

Preface

Although I am sure she has no recollection of this, the initial idea for thisbook occurred during a conversation I had with Regenia Gagnier manyyears ago. At that time, I had the pleasure of having her as a colleague atStanford. Maybe it was partially because we both had been trained atBerkeley and shared some sense of displacement in Silicon Valley, butfor some reason Regenia started talking about rational choice theory.Not only was she speaking about it with regard to her research interests,but she was also commenting on how, after having been what she felt along time at Stanford, she sensed that this way of accounting for humanbehavior had become pervasive on campus. Eventually I came to feelthat along with rational choice theory came an implicit set of values,which I later dubbed ‘‘rational choice thinking.’’ By that I meant thebelief that not only could human decision-making be formalized inrational choice’s parsimonious and elegant formula, but also that itsvarious manifestations could be widely articulated as ‘‘common sense’’—‘‘people’’ act on the basis of common ways of reasoning, and, what ismore, they should be treated according to that logic. This kind ofthinking undergirds our sense of how we behave toward each other andthink about the world. Two incidents, which occurred a decade apart,illustrated this in a particularly dramatic fashion.

The first was Larry Summers’s infamous World Bank memo of 1991.∞

During his tenure as chief economist for the World Bank, Summers is-sued a memo suggesting that there was indeed a problem with pollution—the First World had too much of it, and the Third World too little. Heproffered a number of rational-choice type arguments, among them therationale that since the life expectancy of those living in the Third Worldwas so far below that of those living in the First World, the human costof breathing toxic fumes and consuming toxic food and water would bemuch greater in the First World than in the Third. After all, those living

viii Preface

in the Third World couldn’t expect to live as long as ‘‘we’’ do, so whatwould be wrong with reducing their lifetimes by a minuscule amount,when, on the other hand, if we ourselves were to breathe in the by-products of our First World lifestyle, it would decrease our lifetimes by amuch greater proportion? As Summers puts it,

‘‘Dirty’’ Industries: Just between you and me, shouldn’t the World Bankbe encouraging more migration of the dirty industries to the ldcs[Less Developed Countries]? . . . The demand for a clean environmentfor aesthetic and health reasons is likely to have very high incomeelasticity. The concern over an agent that causes a one in a millionchange in the odds of prostrate cancer is obviously going to be muchhigher in a country where people survive to get prostrate cancer thanin a country where under 5 mortality is 200 per thousand. Also, muchof the concern over industrial atmosphere discharge is about visibil-ity impairing particulates. These discharges may have very little directhealth impact. Clearly trade in goods that embody aesthetic pollutionconcerns could be welfare enhancing. While production is mobile theconsumption of pretty air is a non-tradable.≤

The response of Jose Lutzenberger, the Brazilian minister of the en-vironment, on reading this leaked memo seems to sum it up well:

Your reasoning is perfectly logical but totally insane. . . . Your thoughts[provide] a concrete example of the unbelievable alienation, reduction-ist thinking, social ruthlessness and the arrogant ignorance of manyconventional ‘‘economists’’ concerning the nature of the world we livein. . . . If the World Bank keeps you as vice president it will lose allcredibility. To me it would confirm what I often said . . . the best thingthat could happen would be for the Bank to disappear.≥

While one might applaud such a sentiment, Lutzenberger appears tooffer a contradiction: aren’t logic and sanity deeply affiliated? Whatcould be their possible point of separation? Glossing the terms helpsuntease the ‘‘rational’’ from the sociopathic, the ‘‘impeccable’’ ethics ofbusiness based on some utilitarian notion of ‘‘the greater good’’ (par-ticularly construed, of course) from the notion of an ethical systembased on some sense of global community and the goal of a moredemocratic, just, and equal modality of interdependence. What werethe respective fates of Summers and Lutzenberger? Lutzenberger wasfired after sending his riposte, while Summers became President Bill

Preface ix

Clinton’s secretary of the Treasury, then president of Harvard Univer-sity, and then a chief economic advisor to President Barack Obama.

The second example took place shortly after 9/11: the Pentagon’sDefense Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa) proposed a ‘‘ter-rorism futures market.’’ As one news article put it,

It sounds jaw-droppingly callous, not to mention absurd: An Internetgambling parlor, sponsored by the U.S. government, on politics in theMiddle East. Anyone, from Osama bin Laden to your grandmother, canbet over the Web on such questions as whether Yasser Arafat will beassassinated or Turkey’s government will be overthrown.

If the bettors are right, they’ll win money; if they’re wrong, they’ll losetheir wagers. The site itself will keep numerical tallies of the current‘‘odds’’ for various events.

Why not just ask the guys at the corner bar whether or not we shouldinvade Jordan, or play SimCity to make foreign policy decisions? Butexperts say the darpa-backed Policy Analysis Market . . . is based on alegitimate theory, the Efficient Market Hypothesis, that has a proventrack record in predicting outcomes. Basically, the idea is that the col-lective consciousness is smarter than any single person. By forcing peo-ple to put their money where their mouth is, the wagers help weedout know-nothings and give more weight to the opinions of those inthe know.

‘‘Markets are a great way of aggregating information that a lot ofdifferent people have,’’ said Eric Zitzewitz, an assistant professor ofeconomics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. ‘‘One of the bigissues with intelligence that was gathered before 9/11 was that infor-mation wasn’t aggregated within the intelligence community. This isdirectly aimed at addressing that.’’∂

Although the idea sounds offensive to some, ‘‘to the extent this haseven a small probability of using valuable information to help preventtragedies, that’s got to be the overriding ethical concern,’’ he said.∑

Nevertheless, what led to the scheme’s downfall was not its sheerweirdness, but the fact that it was broadly publicized. Even Fox Newscommented,

When the plan was disclosed Monday by Democratic Sens. Ron Wydenof Oregon and Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, the Pentagon defendedit as a way to gain intelligence about potential terrorists’ plans. Wyden

x Preface

called it ‘‘a federal betting parlor on atrocities and terrorism.’’ Dorgandescribed it as ‘‘unbelievably stupid.’’

Criticism mounted Tuesday. On the Senate floor, Democratic LeaderThomas Daschle of South Dakota denounced the program as ‘‘an incen-tive actually to commit acts of terrorism.’’ ‘‘This is just wrong,’’ declaredDaschle, D-S.D. At an Armed Services Committee hearing, Sen. HillaryRodham Clinton called it ‘‘a futures market in death.’’ At the Foreign Re-lations hearing, [Deputy Defense Secretary Paul] Wolfowitz defendeddarpa, saying ‘‘it is brilliantly imaginative in places where we wantthem to be imaginative. It sounds like maybe they got too imaginative,’’he said, smiling.∏

While there is much here to comment on, I focus on two aspects thatrelate to the main concerns of this book. First, there were the rivalmetrics of the various cost-benefit analyses—moral, ethical, practical,and ‘‘aesthetic’’ (it just sounded wrong). The Deliverance of Others isintimately concerned with how literary aesthetics in particular help usmeditate on the ways we are connected to, and act in relation to, others.Second, there was Wolfowitz’s chilling suggestion that the notion of aterrorism futures market was perhaps just a case of too much imagina-tion. Really? Where did darpa cross the line? And do we really want toharness the imagination of the world in this way?π In this volume I tacklethe problematic of what drives our imaginations, especially of others,and what limits our imagination, for both good and bad reasons. In-deed, I am interested in how literature helps us think through thesejudgments.

In these pages I look at the various modes of representing and analyz-ing how humans behave, make choices, express preferences, achievegoals, and assess their place in the world vis-à-vis their goals. However,The Deliverance of Others addresses not only rational choice theory, butalso other modes of defining human commonality and interaction—thediscourse of the human body and how bodies can interpenetrate in(even) nonsexual ways; the discourse of the emotions and sentiments,and how both are common properties of humans, yet flow between us aswell. These questions form the building blocks of my reassessment ofthe role of contemporary narrative literature in imagining this ‘‘togeth-erness’’ in and with the other in a critical fashion that I believe should becentral to any reading of and any teaching of what we now call ‘‘worldliterature.’’ Let me provide another anecdote—a more generic one.

Preface xi

One of the first rites of being welcomed into a new community isoften the cocktail party. I am sure what I am about to relate has hap-pened, for example, to every teacher of literature. You are nibbling onyour curried shrimp, swilling your chardonnay, and a nice person comesand asks what you do. You say, ‘‘I teach at X.’’ You feel secure—you have ajob, it’s a good school, people like schools. But you don’t feel that wayfor long. ‘‘Oh? What do you teach?’’ Here I would say, ‘‘Comparativeliterature.’’ My new friend’s eyes start scanning for an escape route—where is there a venture capitalist or engineer or, even better, both in thesame body? I can see reeling through my soon-to-disappear friend’smind a flashback to the English A.P. exam: ‘‘Lord, he’s going to ask mewhat I have been reading, and even worse, to discuss my thoughts on it!’’OK, I feel the same way when I meet engineers. That’s why we havecocktails, and lovely weather to point to here in the Valley.

For twenty-odd years now, I have been trying to see how certainpowerful ways of describing how we are bound together have takenhold: we are the same because we all define, rationalize, and reach forour economic preferences and utilities in the same way; we all have ahuman body; we all have human emotions. These are baseline assump-tions, and they help keep us talking to each other. But what has hap-pened now, in this age of increased globalization, when more and morepeople—closer to us in real and virtual ways than before—need to bevetted on whether or not they are actually the same as us in these ways,precisely? Furthermore, what happens when we try to imagine thegenesis and consequences of seeing others through the systems thatdeliver them to us? And how can the humanities, and literature inparticular, aid us in understanding these new sets of problems of ‘‘deliv-erance’’ in this newly interconnected world?

I admit that the phrase ‘‘the deliverance of others’’ has a strong biblicalair and tradition, as it refers to how others can be lead into ‘‘the light.’’While this volume does not emphasize that connotation of the phrase,because of the import of its clear ethical connotations, neither does itdisavow it. What happens when we take on the call to embrace othersand take responsibility for them? Put more precisely, this book seeks todelve into the shape, nature, and structure of systems that deliver other-ness to us—taking people from ‘‘different’’ worlds and importing theminto ours—and analyze those systems when even the most benign andseemingly neutral ones of them actually work to filter out ‘‘excessive’’otherness for the sake of the functioning of the system. The questions

xii Preface

then come to be about what ‘‘difference’’ gets siphoned off and where itgoes, and, more important, what stays in to change the system, showingits limitations when it comes to actually presenting others to us andcreating an ethical global community. I look to literature—specifically,modern and contemporary prose narratives—as a unique mode of un-derstanding a world comprised of new peoples, new choices, new data,all seeking to interact in the best way possible. It would be my hope that,at the cocktail party, I would pull out a literary example and show howits treatment of some issue about which my interlocutor surely knows(economics, choice theory, healthcare, biomedicine, advertising, infor-mation, media) not only describes how those systems work (or don’t),but also how the literary imagination and literary art sees, from a pointoutside the system, another way of conceiving of those relations be-tween people in those delivery systems. In my most hopeful moments,and if my friend is still there, I would close with some discussion of whatthis experience has tried to teach us about living together ethically. Thisis a short book, meant to be almost a kind of primer. I hope you find ituseful.

Acknowledgments

I want to express my gratitude to a number of people. I have had thegreat benefit of talking about the subjects treated in this study, in directand indirect ways, with many wonderful colleagues and friends. RenatoRosaldo and Mary Pratt welcomed me to Stanford and their culturalstudies reading group two decades ago, and I will never forget theintellectual buzz, the comradely good humor, and the sense of doingsomething important in the curriculum and in our writing that kepttheir house aglow. It was in that context that I first met Regenia Gagnier,to whom I owe the kernel of inspiration for this book. I also want tothank two people who, along with their intellectual brilliance, exemplifyfor me the warmth, humor, and humaneness one would want to aspireto: Linda Hutcheon and Roland Greene. I also want to thank HeatherHouser, whose work in a graduate seminar and in the fine dissertationthat followed opened my eyes to so much, and whose work is now doingthe same for all its readers. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has been a coreinspiration for many years, and nothing has delighted me more thannow working with her in various venues. Her notion of literature’s‘‘unverifiability’’ has always stayed with me, along with the need toactually read, and read, and read, and to think first, before anything else,ethically.

Lastly, there are some people without whom in all honesty this bookreally would not have been written. I thank Karen Kuo for patientlyworking out so many issues and sharing so much with me. Ruth Ozekiwas kind enough not only to share her films and fiction with me, butalso, over the course of a term here at Stanford, to discuss at length andwith humor and insight her creative process. I owe a huge debt to Shu-mei Shih, Rob Wilson, Wai Chee Dimock, Bruce Robbins, NirvanaTanoukhi, and Françoise Lionnet for their wonderful and inspiring

xiv Acknowledgments

enthusiasm, support, and friendship in many venues and encounters—much of what you find in these pages is in fact as much their thinking asmine. Each of these people has immensely broadened my sense ofliterature, helped me make my ideas as clear and compelling as possible,and lifted my spirits when I really wondered what in the world I thoughtI was doing. Finally, I owe a debt to Ken Wissoker, of Duke UniversityPress, whose enthusiasm for and appreciation of the idea for this bookdid much to make it more than just an idea. I was also fortunate inthe two press readers that Ken enlisted—their engaged, serious, andrigorous comments helped immeasurably in guiding revision of themanuscript.

As always, my greatest debt is to my wife, Sylvie, and to our son,Fabrice. Sylvie, with her deep love of the intellect and especially ofliterature, showed me, in conversation and action over these decades,how life and art are not separate, and that strolling down any avenue oroceanside can animate conversation about what, for instance, we haddebated at a recent graduate seminar, or lectured about in class, or triedto prove to our son, and how what we experience in life can enhance ourunderstanding of the lessons we try to teach our students (and our-selves) as we pick up a work of literature and open a page. My one wishis that the world becomes more aware of this truth about life and art,and ethics and pleasure, for our son’s tremendous talent, creativity, andlove of the arts deserves a home, too.

Introduction

One of the chief aims of this study is to help us arrive at a sense ofresponsibility toward others by learning to read contemporary litera-ture in a way that includes a critical reappraisal of systems and dis-courses of ‘‘sameness’’ that deliver others to us. Specifically, I look toideas of rationality, of the family, of the body, and of affect—each ofthese notions holds within it some sign of human commonality andcommunicability, or ‘‘deliverance.’’ I show how these discursive ‘‘deliverysystems’’ imply commensurate relations between selves and others, andyet how these relatively simple systems become less and less stable asthey interact with, and try to accommodate, a more radical type ofotherness produced in contemporary historical contexts. Each of thenovels treated in this book rigorously tests the faith these systems placein commonality and commensurateness; each text offers a vivid andoften troubling view of the disruption of such a belief in our contempo-rary age. Nonetheless, there is in each of these novels also a redemptivemoment that, while certainly not unproblematic, gives a different viewof each ‘‘delivery system,’’ and this vision resides precisely in the deliv-erance available through the literary aesthetic. However, and critically, Iupdate the idea of the aesthetic to include the specific problems literaryaesthetics face in this age of increased ‘‘otherness’’ and virtual proximity.

I begin, in this introduction, by showing how the notion of empathyhas defined the relation between self and other in rhetorical, social-philosophical, and finally literary discourses. The first two of these arguethat similarity and identification are necessary between orator and lis-tener, or between social actors. I juxtapose this to modern literature’svalorization of difference—the aim of literature is precisely to deliver tous ‘‘others’’ with lives unlike our own. This makes literature qualitativelydifferent in aim and scope. However, this also presents a historical

2 Introduction

problem today. The notion that literature should mobilize (or eveninstantiate) empathy for others and enhance our ethical capabilities isrooted in the early modern period, wherein ‘‘otherness,’’ while certainlyincreasingly present, was not nearly as immediately, insistently, and in-tensely pressing itself into the here and now of everyday social, cultural,and political life. This voluminous influx, quantitatively and qualitativelynew, is a distinct feature of the late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century age of globalization. We now have to deal with this question: ifwe still adhere to the modern valorization of literature as bringing thelives of others to us in a vivid way, once we admit ‘‘others’’ into ‘‘our’’world and place value in the difference they bring into our lives, wheredo we set the limit of how much otherness is required, as opposed to howmuch is excessive, disruptive, disturbing, in ways that damage us, ratherthan enhance our lives? This forces us into taking an ethical position,and calls on us to address another kind of ‘‘selfishness’’: we take so muchand then leave the rest, but at what cost? How have we learned anythingmore about ‘‘us’’ and the situation in which we find ourselves? Contem-porary literary narratives generate worlds in which we must puzzle outthese questions in particular manners.

Previously, people were thought to be able to identify with each otheraccording to the fact they could ‘‘feel’’ as if they too could be in ‘‘thesituation’’ of the other depicted in the orator’s speech, in the socialimaginary, or the narrator’s text. In the present study I update thatunderstanding. Aren’t we all living in the same global ‘‘situation’’? Don’twe all perform rationally as economic subjects in the global economythat transfers goods, materials, bodies, images to all of us across realtime and huge distances? Don’t we now all ingest materials that we findfrom the same sources, transported laterally across the world withoutabsolute regard to borders? Not only food, but also drugs and medicalpractices have become nearly universal. In the most intense form ofsharing human experience, organ transplants disclose the new com-monness, as elements from one body can be inserted into another. Andhaven’t global media fed on and produced similar human affect? Don’tpeople share a common register and repertoire in the realm of feelings,feelings that are touched and produced by worldwide representations ofcontemporary lives? Finally, hasn’t the political world incorporated allsorts of previously disenfranchised people? ‘‘Our’’ situation now cannotso easily bracket off more distant parts of the planet or deny the par-

Introduction 3

ticipation of those close to us, even though separated by race, gender,sexual preference, religion.

Globalization has delivered to us far more distant spaces and peoplesthan ever before, with greater regularity and integration on multiplefronts—economic, political, social, cultural, ecological, epidemiologi-cal, and so on. ‘‘Otherness’’ is thus not only increasingly in contact withthe ‘‘same,’’ but the points of contact and contagion with otherness arefar more numerous. Therefore, the degree to which we are the same asor different from others is discernible only in very specific manners thatdemand to be carefully and critically scrutinized. I am thus interestedin otherness as both a ‘‘thing,’’ manifested in various forms, and as arelation.

Essentially, the problems of otherness press up against the mainstaysof Western liberal thought. The primacy of the individual, the safe-guarding of her prerogatives to act freely in the world so as to manifestin the fullest way possible her distinctive humanity, is negotiated againstthe recognition of our being together as social creatures. The problem-atics of otherness, as taken up in the course of this study, are thereforeplayed out in the realms of rationality and choice-making, the integrityof the body, the freedom to feel. And yet ‘‘sameness’’ (and ‘‘equality’’),though declared, is not guaranteed, and calling attention not only toinequality, but also to its sources, is as old as liberalism. However, eventsof the postwar era set the stage for ever more potent insistence on‘‘otherness,’’ which paralleled the emergence of new structures that drewpeople together.

The seeds of enfranchisement sown in the eighteenth century weremore fully manifested in the postwar era of decolonization and even-tually in the anti-apartheid era, bringing forth widespread tension overthe distribution of wealth and resources not only in terms of the ‘‘ThirdWorld,’’ but also according to the different mappings of hemispheresand peripheries. Widespread liberatory movements called up issues ofrace, gender, and sexuality. One example of the crisis of expanding anddisruptive otherness was evident in the seventies, as described in areport by the Trilateral Commission, The Crisis of Democracy: Report onthe Governability of Democracies to the Trilateral Commission (1975). Init, Samuel Huntington remarks, ‘‘The essence of the democratic surgeof the 1960s was a general challenge to existing systems of authority,public and private. In one form or another, the challenge manifested

4 Introduction

itself in the family, the university, business, public and private institu-tions, politics, the government bureaucracy, and the military service.People no longer felt the same obligation to obey those whom they hadpreviously considered superior to themselves in age, rank, status, exper-tise, character, or talents. . . . Each group claimed its right to participateequally—in the decision which affected itself.’’∞ In short, while laudingthe active participation of an increasing number of diverse populationson the one hand, Huntington is concerned that there may be too muchof a good thing (or, in the language of this volume, too much other-ness): ‘‘The vitality of democracy in the 1960s raised questions aboutthe governability of democracy in the 1970s.’’≤ This increase in politicalparticipation is ‘‘primarily the result of the increased salience whichcitizens perceive politics to have for their own immediate concerns.’’≥

So what’s wrong with that? Isn’t this precisely the picture of a robustdemocratic society? Not exactly, for this vigor is largely made up ofminority voices and viewpoints demanding attention to their particularneeds, and acted on the basis of other kinds of rationality. This putspressure on the political institutions of the state: ‘‘In the United States,the strength of democracy poses a problem for the governability ofdemocracy. . . . We have come to recognize that there are potentiallydesirable limits to the indefinite extension of political democracy. De-mocracy will have a longer life if it has a more balanced existence.’’∂ Thisominous phrase is indeed Huntington’s concluding statement, and isemblematic of the kind of swelling up of anti-authoritarian ‘‘otherness’’that shows the tipping point of liberalism that occurred not only in theUnited States, but globally. Where were those limits to be drawn? Howwas ‘‘balance’’ going to be achieved? Liberal values, seen both in theethos of modern literature’s role in diversifying our frames of referenceand in liberal democratic rule, become challenged by others who insiston entering the system as full participants, with their otherness fullyintact. Hence the crisis of governability. This hugely revealing statementfrom the mid-seventies signals the historical instantiation of a problem-atic of otherness that spreads into other realms as well, and has onlyintensified as new technologies have created both the promise of newkinds of commonality and new ethical dilemmas. In today’s world, thehierarchical recognition of some rationalities as existing below thethreshold of the rational, of some bodies as harvestable and commodi-fiable, and of some affects as dangerous to the psychic and somatic

Introduction 5

health of the self occur precisely within global delivery systems that owetheir existence to contemporary politics and technologies.

Today we find new political economies of organs, tissues, geneticmaterials that build on and indeed reinforce preexisting structures ofinequality, affluence, need. The value placed on ‘‘the body’’ is nownegotiated in ways once unheard of; now what is up for sale is not only acadaver, but parts of living beings. The very psychic equilibrium of the‘‘self ’’ is put into greater and greater affect of contact, virtually and inface-to-face encounters with others who now appear on our everydaycommunications apparatuses. The sale and transfer of goods and com-modities is premised on continually produced affect in a global market.Given these imperatives, which are facilitated by the logic of neoliberal-ism, how do we regulate the influx of otherness so as not to destabilizethe system? How much of this goes beyond the pale of what liberalideology, so protective of the self, can allow? How much variance in theexercise of rational acts can we tolerate? How do we both facilitate thetransfer and mobilization of bodies and body parts across borders (tosatisfy our needs for labor and bodily rejuvenation, even survival), andcreate walls and barriers to stop autonomous flows of bodies acrossborders? How do we hope to tap into an ‘‘oceanic feeling,’’ so as toinstantiate need and desire for the products we wish to sell, yet stemthe influx of affect that emanates from disruptive others and circulatesback to us?

This study shows how contemporary literary texts register this newhistorical ‘‘situation’’ differently and asks us to reexamine more closelythe grounds for those claims of commonness and to see the still vitalresistance of otherness to it. Not only do the texts I have selected for thisstudy vividly illustrate the precise ways that globalization today differsfrom that of the past, but reading them in the ways I undertake to dohelps us to critically reflect on how we negotiate this new being withotherness.

That others occupy the ‘‘system’’ differently is not hard to recognize.Despite the celebratory gestures of ‘‘globalization,’’ this occupation dis-closes the fissures and residual differences that remain beneath thesurface of systems of sameness. Literary aesthetics today thus involve arecombinatory poetics that would not have been possible without thefriction, resistance, autonomy that otherness still insinuates into the‘‘same.’’ In this study I show how the selected novels each reveal the

6 Introduction

effort to deliver others to us within the contingencies of our historicalcondition. I start by examining closely how ‘‘sameness’’ has been alinchpin in social thought, variously evident in rhetorical treatises andsocial philosophical writings, and then consider the premium modernliterature has placed on ‘‘difference.’’ I then move to a discussion of therelation between the notion of ‘‘situation’’ that englobes self and otherin classical rhetoric and in Adam Smith’s social philosophy, and adaptthat notion to my idea of contemporary ‘‘delivery systems.’’

The Sameness Requirement

‘‘Stepping into the other guy’s shoes works best when you resemblehim. . . . If you are structurally analogous to the empathee, then accurateinputs generate accurate outputs—The greater the isomorphism, themore dependable and precise the results.’’ Or so says Ray Sorensen,writing on what he calls ‘‘Self-Strengthening Empathy’’ in the journalPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research. Thank goodness, then, thatSorensen believes ‘‘Mother Nature has made your mind isomorphic tomine,’’ because this isomorphism aids in the perpetuation of the spe-cies.∑ To put it another way: we empathize, therefore we survive. Thepragmatic aspect of empathy has not been lost to thinkers from theclassical age on. Empathy—feeling the pain or joy or fear experienced byothers—is useful, whether it be to convince one’s audience of the right-ness of one’s position, or as a key element in fostering moral sentimentand social equilibrium, or, indeed, in propagating human kind.

In The Rhetoric we find Aristotle claiming that effective acts of rheto-ric rely on the listener feeling that he could find himself in the verysituation being described in the speech of the orator. Chapters 1 through10 of the Second Book of The Rhetoric are devoted to discussing theemotions and the way they may be enlisted in rhetorical argumentation.The eighth chapter takes as its subject Pity, and Aristotle’s discussionseems to touch on familiar ground: ‘‘We pity those who are like us in age,character, disposition, social standing, or birth; for in all these casesit appears more likely that the same misfortune might befall us also’’(114). Self-interest and indeed self-empathy is not slightly a part of thisreceptivity.

In their discussion of The Rhetoric, William K. Wimsatt and Cleanth

Introduction 7

Brooks raise three useful points. First, they say, one should regard thetext as ‘‘an approach to knowledge.’’∏ I will argue that a large part of thisknowledge is eminently social; Aristotle’s meditation on language anddiscourse has everything to do with how members of a social grouppresent themselves—their ideas, desires, needs, fears—to others, andhow that presentation can be best effected. This notion is supported byanother claim Wimsatt and Brooks make, that The Rhetoric can beregarded as an offshoot of dialectic and also of ethical studies.π In thatrespect the logic attending The Rhetoric is embedded in both dialecticalthinking—reasoning out the exchanges of assertions and responses—and a consideration of the ethical and moral bases and implications oftaking certain positions vis-à-vis the orator’s discourse. Finally, Wimsattand Brooks point out that The Rhetoric ‘‘presents alternatives, thingsthat might have been.’’∫ In that sense the epistemological and ethicalrealms are enriched by a set of data that exceeds the empirical. So wemight raise the question anew—the imagination of ‘‘things that mighthave been’’ seems in The Rhetoric tightly bonded to a realist logic—as towhether ‘‘things that might be’’ are contained within the scope of experi-ences we might plausibly imagine happening to us. Simply put, if wecannot ‘‘relate’’ to it, the situation the speaker puts before us falls flat. Wemight well react to it, but Aristotle says that our response and ourreceptivity will be less than if it were something we could imaginehappening to us. Now what kind of moral does that teach, what kind ofaction can take place, given this new requirement for identification?

Aristotle’s basic premise regarding rhetorical effect and the emotionsin the classical age—that we feel most strongly about and are mostreceptive to the stories or topoi that we could imagine inhabiting—isfound as well in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments. Indeed,Smith’s text likewise connects this topic to the issue of social exchangeand norms—feeling ‘‘the same’’ is a powerful force in social interaction.And Smith also turns his attention to the imagination and the kinds ofimaginings made possible solely by feeling that one could be affected insimilar ways that others are. Critically, in the course of his disquisition,the ‘‘original’’ situation that prompts our identification with the suffererrecedes into the background as our imaginations latch onto that eventin order to launch a separate set of sensations in our own bodies. Wecan never actually feel the pain of others, but we can imagine whatit must feel like. Smith even goes so far as to say that since we can

8 Introduction

never empirically verify what the other is feeling, it really doesn’t mat-ter what he or she feels. We dwell instead in our own imagined senseof what we, in the situation of the other, would feel. Indeed, in thefollowing passage, ‘‘we’’ are channeled into the imagined body of theother person.

As we have no immediate experience of what other men feel, we canform no idea of the manner in which they are affected, but by conceiv-ing what we ourselves should feel in the like situation. Though ourbrother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, oursenses will never inform us of what he suffers. They never did, and nevercan, carry us beyond our own person, and it is by the imagination onlythat we can form any conception of what are his sensations. Neither canthat faculty help us to this any other way, than by representing to uswhat would be our own, if we were in his case. It is the impressions ofour own senses only, not those of his, which our imaginations copy. Bythe imagination we place ourselves in his situation, we conceive our-selves enduring all the same torments, we enter as it were into hisbody, and become in some measure the same person with him, andthence form some idea of his sensations, and even feel something which,though weaker in degree, is not altogether unlike them. His agonies,when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have adoptedand made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then trembleand shudder at the thought of what he feels.Ω

One notes how this passage ends in sketching out the grey areas of thismerging of self and other. This points to a key element in the problem-atic examined in this study and which achieves full force in this concisestatement from Smith’s text: ‘‘Sympathy, therefore, does not arise somuch from the view of the passion, as from that of the situation whichexcites it. We sometimes feel for another; because, when we put our-selves in his case, that passion arises in our breast from the imagination,though it does not in his from the reality.’’∞≠ We cannot be the other, butwe can try to imagine what her or his situation would make us feel like.However, we then need to ask, on what basis do we assume to be able tofeel anything like they are feeling? What norms, assumptions, presump-tions, what notions of mimesis, what norms of ‘‘human behavior’’ do weintuitively draw on to make sense of our bold statement that ‘‘we feelyour pain’’? Let me be clear—I am not suggesting that we should or that

Introduction 9

we even could avoid such attempts at sympathy and empathy. My point,rather, is to examine closely the ethical and political nature of those actsof empathy, and conversely, those moments when we assume we cannot‘‘relate.’’

These concerns are evident as well (though not expressed in thatfashion) in the social pragmatic of Smith’s treatise, which is made clearin the title of section 1: ‘‘Of the Sense of Propriety.’’ The key use to whichthese insights into sympathy are put is not unlike the one found in TheRhetoric: emotions, intersubjective feeling, identification are all consid-ered in light of what kinds of social norms need to be maintained amongindividual emotions. Smith describes in detail how individual emotionsare to be contained and disciplined by social norms—without this mod-eration, emotions can run amok in their excessive difference. And it isprecisely through a complex process of imagining what others mightthink of our emotions that social emotional norms are installed in indi-viduals. The following passage from The Theory of Moral Sentimentsreminds us not a little of Sartre’s notion of the ‘‘gaze’’: it is not that weactually believe someone is looking at us and hence we adjust ourbehavior, but rather that as social beings we have internalized the gaze ofothers and act as if someone were always watching us, as through akeyhole. Smith’s subject finds himself watching himself and ‘‘abating’’the power of his emotions, abashedly, under the gaze of others.

As they are constantly considering what they themselves would feel, ifthey actually were the sufferers, so he is constantly led to imaginein what manner he would be affected if he was only one of the specta-tors of his own situation. As their sympathy makes them look at it insome measure with his eyes, so his sympathy makes him look at it, insome measure, with theirs, especially when in their presence, and actingunder their observation: and, as the reflected passion which he thusconceives is much weaker than the original one, it necessarily abates theviolence of what he felt before he came into their presence, before hebegan to recollect in what manner they would be affected by it, and toview his situation in this candid and impartial light.∞∞

All this is to enable the individual to ascertain the correct level atwhich to express his emotions. As with Aristotle, this has a pragmaticpurpose—too much or too little will result in the individual not gainingthe empathy of his audience: ‘‘He can only hope to obtain this by

10 Introduction

lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable ofgoing along with him. He must flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, thesharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony andconcord with the emotions of those who are about him.’’∞≤

Smith expresses the desired outcome of all this as being therapeuticfor the individual, emanating from a Freudian super-ego: ‘‘Society andconversation, therefore, are the most powerful remedies for restoringthe mind to its tranquility.’’∞≥ And yet the barely concealed complementto this curative imagined negotiation is also social tranquility. Individ-ual emotions circulate dynamically and also smoothly; encounters, realor imagined, with an other’s pain, suffering, joy, happiness are, after aninitial expansion, ultimately contracted, drawn back into the ‘‘proper’’register. In the terms of this book, we find here a ‘‘delivery system’’: asocial discourse—that set of conventions for both communication andbehavior—creates and maintains norms that convert otherness to same-ness. Extreme behavior on the part of the individual is tamped downand readjusted to the system of behaviors and emotional expressionproper to society.

The Difference Requirement

The valuing of sameness in Aristotle and Smith contrasts sharply withliterature’s privileging of difference, which gives the literary work of artan opposite role to play. Rather than holding to the values of rhetoric,which relies on sameness to realize its persuasive force, or those ofSmith’s moral sentiments, which rely on sameness to understand andfacilitate practical moral action, or even those of Sorenson’s ‘‘preserva-tion of the species’’ theory, in which sameness is required for the empa-thy that will continue, precisely, ‘‘us,’’ literature is supposed to deliver usout of our ‘‘comfort zone.’’ Literature has another purpose—to becomesomething else, something better: ‘‘The sole advantage in possessinggreat works of literature lies in what they can help us become.’’∞∂

The tradition of regarding literature as a particularly powerful vehiclefor conveying a sense of another’s life, and of believing that being put intouch with that dissimilar life is important for one’s moral growth, iswell established and specifically attached to realist narrative. One of themost famous statements on the matter comes from George Eliot’s re-view essay on The Natural History of German Life (1895).

Introduction 11

The greatest benefit we owe to the artist, whether painter, poet, ornovelist, is the extension of our sympathies. Appeals founded upongeneralizations and statistics require a sympathy ready-made, a moralsentiment already in activity; but a picture of human life such as a greatartist can give, surprises even the trivial and the selfish into that atten-tion to what is apart from themselves, which may be called the nearestthing to life; it is a mode of amplifying experience and extending ourcontact with our fellow-men beyond the bounds of our personal lot.∞∑

What is noteworthy here is the manner in which Eliot uses this distinc-tion in tandem with another distinction, this time between two differentkinds of sympathy. Generalizations and statistics seem to belong to theconventional, learned forms of moral sentiment—they produce predict-able results.∞∏ Indeed, one almost gets the sense that they tap into auniversal affective register: when presented with this or that statistic,one will likely react in this or that fashion, manifesting an already exist-ing and eminently shared feeling. This is not so far from what we find inTheory of Moral Sentiments, where Smith very plainly states the need to‘‘abate’’ excessive and potentially damaging emotional expression inorder to adjust one’s emotional register to the social norm. However, thepicture shifts with Eliot’s discussion of ‘‘great’’ art.

In the case of great art, there is nothing ready-made, already existing,part of a sentimental consensus, so to speak. Instead, we are presentedwith something outside ourselves and outside our conventional be-havior. This is a potent force, affecting ‘‘even the trivial,’’ even ‘‘theselfish.’’ What are we presented with in great art, and why is this good?What we obtain through reading is a life not like our own and a lifespecifically beyond ‘‘our lot.’’ Not only does it not seem like what wehave experienced, it also comes from experiences that are not likely everto be ours at all. And that is the point of great art—it stirs in us a sense ofdifference, and this difference, if delivered well, in turn prompts us toreach beyond the ordinary sphere of our proper existence. This tran-scendence leads to a deeper and broader sort of empathy. And at thatmoment, we ‘‘become’’ something different, something inflected withotherness.

One of the most notable contemporary proponents of this view is ofcourse Martha Nussbaum, who writes, ‘‘Literary works typically invitetheir readers to put themselves in the place of people of many differentkinds.’’∞π Literature can help us appreciate ‘‘what is it like to live the life

12 Introduction

of another person who might, given changes in circumstance, be one-self.’’∞∫ While there is an unmistakable liberal tone to all this—literatureputs us in touch with a wider range of experience, which causes us to bemore tolerant because we now understand the lives of others as beingimaginable as ours—there is also and no less a sense of acquisition andagglomeration. We are getting more out of this encounter.

Indeed, these sentiments reach a crescendo in a passage from WayneBooth that sounds like nothing so much as the Twenty-third Psalm.

To dwell with you is to share the improvements you have managed tomake in your ‘‘self ’’ by perfecting your narrative world. You lead me firstto practice ways of living that are more profound, more sensitive, moreintense, and in a curious way more fully generous than I am likely tomeet anywhere else in the world. You correct my faults, rebuke myinsensitivities. You mold me into patterns of longing and fulfillment thatmake my ordinary dreams seem petty and absurd.∞Ω

In each of these pronouncements we are led to the same conclusion—great works of literature deliver difference, otherness, that which isnonsimilar to us, all with the effect of making us better, richer, moremoral, more tolerant, more sensitive to the world and the lives it con-tains. Critically, there seems to be a convergence of two different sorts ofotherness: literature presents the worlds of others to us, leading usto inhabit those worlds and live those lives; concomitantly, the re-presentation of this otherness is itself of a nature entirely different fromthe world of experience, and while it brings us closer to others, it cannotor does not reach complete deliverance, so to speak. It stands alongside,or apart from, life. As Eliot puts it, it is ‘‘the nearest thing to life.’’ In thatsense, literature itself is otherness.

The Problem of Otherness

Even the most ardent proponents of the school that would have us readthe lives of others radically different from ourselves are confronted by anessential problem: how much otherness is required? How much con-founds us, rather than enriches us? How ‘‘different’’ can their ‘‘lot’’ befrom ours before it recedes into unintelligibility? We become caught in aoscillating movement, identifying and de-identifying, weighing what we

Introduction 13

can, and cannot, learn from. The encounter provided by literary textsinvolves both sameness and difference in an unpredictable relation. Wecannot know in advance what this ‘‘other’’ actually is, or the circum-stances in which they find themselves. Both similarity and differencemay be deceptive, and in the working out of this ratio, we extendgenerosity, empathy, pity, but also perhaps distain, even contempt. Thisis not only, as Nussbaum says, ‘‘the political promise’’ of literature, butalso the political problematic of literature. When she says, ‘‘It is thepolitical promise of literature that it can transport us while remainingourselves, into the life of another, revealing similarities but also pro-found differences between the life and thought of that other and myselfand making them comprehensible or at least more nearly comprehen-sible,’’ the question I want to ask is, how are ‘‘they’’ comprehensible?≤≠ Ifso, how so? How much? These are precisely political problems, and theyjust grow larger when we take it to the next level—that of the effect thatthis literary encounter is supposed to have on how we sense ourselvesanew in the world and how we act given this new sensibility.

The adjudication of how much otherness we need to encounter andgrapple with in order to be better people and how much will prove to beour undoing is, again, both a logistical one and a political problem.Booth himself finds a tension between otherness of a degree sufficientto present the occasion for learning, growth, and revaluing the world,and too much otherness. On the one hand, he openly acknowledges that‘‘surely no beast [that] will prove genuinely other will fail to bite, and theotherness that bites, the otherness that changes us, must have sufficientdefinition, sufficient identity, to threaten us where we live.’’≤∞ Yet, on theother hand, that threat has to be tamed. Four hundred pages later in hisstunning book, Booth admits, ‘‘I have had to play both sides of thisstreet throughout these chapters: we must both open ourselves to ‘oth-ers’ that look initially dangerous or worthless, and yet prepare ourselvesto cast them off whenever, after keeping company with them, we con-clude that they are potentially harmful.’’≤≤ Indeed, as Booth says, we areplaying both sides—of similarity of ‘‘situation’’ and lives beyond our lot.The line between the requirements of, on the one hand, similarity(rhetoric and Smith’s social theory) and, on the other hand, difference(modern literature) is not at all as clear as I have initially drawn it, forliterature, it seems, demands both identification and difference at once.We find a vacillating dynamic between empathy and critique, sameness

14 Introduction

and difference, that creates in the texts I examine a particular image ofwhat it is to live with others in the contemporary world.

Let me sum up what we’ve learned thus far and then offer anotherpossibility. First, there is the notion that we read to open ourselves toexperiences that are not ours and will most likely never be ours, but byacknowledging that otherness as otherness, we both see its differencefrom us and are thereby enriched, and we also appreciate the complexityof the world. Second, there is the belief that we also may be presentedwith an otherness that, as true and formidable otherness, knocks us offour feet, sweeps away what Ricoeur calls ‘‘the stability of the same,’’ andleaves us on the canvas. How to know when to keep reading and when toclose the book? The literary text will not tell us. It is itself of anotherworld and is not constrained to make sense in the ways we are used toexpecting of communicative objects. So why read?

Perhaps the search to find the ‘‘right’’ or necessary balance for theencounter with otherness, along with the related issue of transparency ofmeaning (‘‘Once I have established the necessary and tolerable balancepoint of sameness/otherness, how do I know that I am actually under-standing what is going on?’’), is indeed an abysmal task and a questionimpossible to resolve. How does one codify and set conventions forencounters with others? What protocols can anticipate every kind ofmeeting between such vaguely defined entities as ‘‘same’’ and ‘‘other’’?I suggest that rather than focusing entirely on meaning-making, andwhether we get it or not, we should think of how literature engenders aspace for imagining our relation to others and thinking through why andhow that relation exists, historically, politically, ideologically. This inturn creates new forms of narration and representation, which I will putforward in analyses of four novels. Reading with this in mind wouldattempt to ascertain how and why our relationship to others is notnatural or immutable, but rather the result of a number of complex andoften contradictory forces, some that draw us closer, others that drive usapart. Notions of radical alterity are herein considered just as tentativeas notions of universalism and unproblematic commonality. Ethicallyand politically we can imagine—indeed, we must imagine—that the les-sening of otherness can be and is often not only desirable but alsonecessary—in fact, it happens all the time (and is often called coalitionpolitics, or politics in general)—and that encountering difficult thingscan be crippling, again, not only spiritually but politically as well.

Introduction 15

Put concisely, there is no way to say in advance what the properresponse to alterity should be or what would be the grounds on whichto judge the proper or complete deciphering of meaning. Rather, it isimportant to turn our attention to the purchase we make in the namesof sameness, otherness, commonality, radical incommensurability, andso on. This gesture might well be called deconstructive. And it is in acareful attention to a newly invented, contemporary literary form thatsuch imaginings and meditations are made possible, as the literary text,in refusing or at least deferring meaning, gives us pause to see moreprecisely our relationship to others—what enables or disables certainmodes of connection and meaning-making. We should better attend tothe historicity and contingency of social and collective identities asprecisely intersections of both proximate and distant identities. Thetask is not only to measure the distance, but also to try to account for it.Literature, and more specifically reading literature, helps us fess up toour standards of measurement, our yardsticks, because the text takes usoutside our usual habitations of meaning, sense-making, self-assurance.In this process, the way literature comes to be written in different,difficult ways shows its elastic powers, but also its breaking points.Sometimes the system is overwhelmed by the task of delivering toomuch otherness, of reconciling radically disparate actions that can-not be made into sense. We then are forced to ask why and how we setthose limits.

For example, I regularly teach a course titled ‘‘Comparative Fictionsof Ethnicity,’’ in which we read a number of different narratives, manyautobiographical; we discuss how the authors articulate the idea ofethnic identity. We consider things like the difference genre makes whenwe read John Wideman’s Brothers and Keepers, which vacillates betweenthe voice of the award-winning novelist John and his attempts to repre-sent the voice of his convict brother, Robby, who is serving a life sen-tence for murder. We talk about how this attempt to convey othernesschallenges the author to both convey it and let it remain a place ofincommensurable difference. Having the class accept that doublenesswas hard enough. But then we turned to read an autobiography titledRestavec, by a Haitian man named Jean-Robert Cadet. Cadet was bornthe bastard child of a Haitian prostitute and one of her white Frenchclients. The narrative is harrowing, dwelling in poverty and disgrace andloathing and illiteracy. It is crudely written, and while we might sym-

16 Introduction

pathize with the author, a real experiential distance is insisted on, mak-ing identification impossible. He comes to the United States, but noimmigrant narrative of self-improvement takes place. After he enlists, hefinds comradeship among African American servicemen, but he in-forms on them after they start smoking dope. How is this an admirablecharacter? Many in the class simply hated the novel, despite all myattempts to get them to suspend their assumptions about what made agood piece of writing.

I could have insisted that the students read the story closely, and Idid, but the usual way of reading for content left them unenthused. Adifferent world was depicted in Restavec, and they didn’t like it, andthey were glad Cadet’s lot was not theirs. I changed tack, asking themto consider what this dissonance could tell us about our relationshipto otherness, to consider how that relationship was not inevitable, toconsider what assumptions about narrative, about value, about ethics,about what a family is, about what an immigrant narrative was wereoverturned, or at least stymied, by Cadet’s book, by both its formand content.

Yet the questions raised by this particular classroom experience—which, I think one has to admit, are often ours as well as we encounterparticularly ‘‘difficult’’ texts—force us to revisit Aristotle, Smith, andothers who place such emphasis on the notion that the situation of thecharacter, speaker, audience, reader, and so on is the determining factorof the degree of empathy available and the launching point of the imagi-nation as well, that is, that we must be able to imagine being in another’ssituation, and that imagining itself will then spur our imaginations innew directions. And literature ups the ante. In it, we are no longerseeking only common ground—situations we, too, might find ourselvesin—but now also situations beyond our individual lots. This, again, isthe oscillating dynamic engendered and problematized by literature.Furthermore, the degree to which these ‘‘situations’’ are similar or notis hard to discern these days, precisely because ‘‘globalization’’ seemsto have ‘‘flattened’’ things out such that significant (in the minds ofFriedman and his disciples) markers of difference no longer remain.More important, perhaps, the ‘‘situations’’ others find themselves inare often regarded by inhabitants of the First World, northern hemi-spheric regions as either indecipherable or negligible, that is to say, theyare either beyond our ken, too saturated with difference, or that differ-

Introduction 17

ence is not insurmountable under the logic of what I am calling ourcontemporary ‘‘delivery systems.’’ These systems either finally relin-quish the notion of commonality and consider these particularly obdu-rate others to be unassimilable to our logic and reason, or they winnowout difference and bring the other to us in some now recognizable form.My focus thus shifts from the enrichment literature is supposed to bringinto our lives by presenting us with the lives of others, and the sup-posedly enhanced empathetic powers it gives us, to the grounds onwhich we strike that encounter—how are such terms as same and dif-ferent secured?

Both Aristotle and Smith, in their respective domains, consider situa-tions to be critical for self-other identifications, but both are vague as towhat would qualify as a situation. Does it simply refer to a plot element,like the loss of a parent or a perceived injustice? If so, how much detailhas to be omitted for the situation to be general enough to solicitidentification? In the next section I connect this problem to the ways inwhich contemporary thinkers have revisited Smith and deployed theimagination as the faculty by which to see in another’s life a ‘‘situation’’that one might find oneself in, but in these cases that act of imaginationis anchored in global material history, ethical action, and political prac-tice. In the same spirit I examine closely the dynamic between the selfand ‘‘others’’ (both in terms of characters and ‘‘other’’ situations) as readagainst and delivered through ready-made, already existing codifiedstructures, discourses, and institutions. More specifically, I am inter-ested in the ways certain assumptions about ‘‘all people’’ are embeddedand manifested in institutional practices, and, critically, how literarynarratives both comment on these assumptions and present variants,countermodels, critiques that thereby challenge ‘‘global’’ conceptualiza-tions of ‘‘we humans.’’ This has, of course, a powerful effect on how weperceive others and act toward and with them.

Rethinking ‘‘Situation,’’ Delivering across Structures

Richard Sennett’s study of respect, Respect in a World of Inequality,draws on the sociological work of C. Wright Mills and Hans Gerth in animportant manner. Specifically, he notes how their idea of ‘‘character’’ isbased on ‘‘a person’s communication with others through shared ‘social

18 Introduction

instruments’—laws, rituals, the media, codes of religious beliefs, politi-cal doctrines.’’≤≥ For Mills and Gerth, character ‘‘is a capacity to engagethe larger world which defines a person’s character; character can bethought of as the relational side of personality, and transcends thedictum that only face-to-face relations are emotionally gripping.’’≤∂ Wemight thus trace the formation of literary ‘‘characters’’ as developingfrom the mobilization and instrumentalization of these and other dis-courses and belief systems, not only as they interact with these struc-tures and systems as individuals, but also as they interact with dis-tant others in non-face-to-face encounters and imaginings, having thesestructures and discursive systems as mediating forms. We can thus havea clearer sense of not only how but also why others differ from us, or not,and when, precisely, we are to award ‘‘respect.’’

This question is especially difficult, and important, when it comes toglobalization. Luc Boltanski’s study of ‘‘distant others’’ makes this espe-cially clear. He declares that in today’s world ‘‘distance is a fundamentaldimension of politics which has the specific task of a unification whichovercomes dispersion.’’≤∑ This ‘‘dispersion’’ is precisely the disunifiedworld, the nonequivalent material histories of those unlike (to onedegree or another) ourselves. Politics must bring together particular(and particularly different) situations, conveying them across a dis-tance. And yet while Boltanski is emphatic about the need for an ‘‘imagi-nary demonstration’’ of unfortunates, he is scrupulously wary of thisprocess. He notes two contradictory requirements: ‘‘On the one handthere is a requirement of impartiality, detachment (no prior commit-ment) and a distinction between the moment of observation, that is tosay, of knowledge, and the moment of action. This requirement pointstowards the possibility of generalisation. On the other hand there is arequirement of affective, sentimental or emotional investment which isneeded to arouse political commitment.’’≤∏ In other words, the lives andsituations of others have to be regarded impartially, lest the prejudices,desires, blind spots of the observer skew her reading and assessment andactions one way or the other. But at the same time, regarding the otherat such a distance might well obviate any affect, affect that would benecessary to compel the observer to act. We need both—but how canwe arrive at a noncontradictory formula? Once again we find the fluc-tuation between identification and disidentification.

In order to get out of this quandary, Boltanski marshals forward twoconcepts. The first is ‘‘aperspectival objectivity’’:

Introduction 19

The relevance of the demand for public speech is due to the existence ofa public sphere which is progressively constituted along with the con-ception of a politics of pity such that it is sometimes difficult to separatehistorically the two analytically distinct processes. The constitution of apublic sphere and a definition of political legitimacy based on a concep-tion of objectivity that emphasizes the possibility of an observationwithout any particular perspective are strictly interdependent. We knowtoday that, among other possible conceptions of objectivity, this con-ception [aperspectival objectivity] which is often associated with thedevelopment of the sciences, and of the experimental sciences in par-ticular, actually originates in the political and moral philosophy of theeighteenth century—from where science will take it fifty years later—and especially in Adam Smith’s attempt to reconstruct morality, to-gether with the foundations of a morally acceptable politics, around thedouble figure of an unfortunate and an impartial spectator who ob-serves him from a distance. Thus we turn now to an examination of therelationship between public sphere, spectacle, and aperspectival objec-tivity. We will then take up again the position of the spectator andendeavour to understand how we might reduce the tension between thedemand for public speech and the prohibition of a description withoutperspective.≤π

What Boltanski is seeking is a way to affect and leave open the pos-sibility for public speech, a source of authorizing such an activity even asthe constraint of objectivity remains. But if we are talking about ‘‘aper-spectival’’ objectivity, then from where does the voice make its utter-ance, and, concomitantly, what kind of space is imagined in which thatvoice is heard? Boltanski remains within this spatial metaphor (of loca-tion, direction, perspective) to articulate his response to those contra-dictory demands.

Coupled with aperspectival objectivity we find something different,something deeply rooted to the subjective and now seen to enablean ethical intersubjectivity—it is the imagination, but the imaginationtethered in a particular way.

The obstacle this distance creates can be overcome by means of afaculty however: the imagination. In the original situation the spectatoris not involved in the scene of suffering he observes. Like the specta-tor affected by the sentiment of the sublime in the account given byBurke . . . , he is sheltered and fears nothing for himself. It is by incor-

20 Introduction

porating distance that the possibility of aesthetic sentiments and moralsentiments (still partially mixed up with each other in Hutcheson) mustbe understood. In Smith, as in Hume, distance is overcome by a deliber-ate act of imagination. The spectator represents to himself the senti-ments and sensations of the suffering. He does not identify with himand does not imagine himself to be in the same situation. As Smithremarks in the chapter of The Theory of Moral Sentiments in whichhe criticizes Hobbes and Mandeville, the spectator imagines what thewoman in child-bed may feel, but does not imagine himself actually inthe process of giving birth, and this excludes a Hobbesian interpretationof pity which is based upon the possibility of experiencing the same-reversals of fortune oneself and consequently on selfish interest. Themediation of the imagination is important because it supports the moraland social edifice without recourse to communal identification or to anEdenic fusion.≤∫

What we find is not a focus on ‘‘fusion,’’ the evaporation of the walls thatseparate self and others, but rather a meditation on the mediation ofthat relationship. That meditation is imaginative, but not fantastic. Ittakes into consideration the real, material circumstances in which theevent is embedded and reflects back on the relation the sufferer and theobserver have to it. This meditation takes place within an engagement—various forms of communication, among which is literature.

In order for imagination to play its role in the coordination of emotionalcommitments, different persons must be able to nourish their imagina-tion from the same source. To illustrate this topic, Smith frequentlyrefers to works of fiction and, in particular, to the feelings inspired in usby the heroes of tragedies and romances.≤Ω In an article devoted to thelinks between impartiality, imagination and compassion, Adrian Pipercalls modal imagination that ability to imagine what is impossible andnot only what actually exists (or what has been directly experienced),and he considers this ability indispensable to the formation and sharingof pity in the face of the suffering of someone else.≥≠ To understand thisability we must have recourse to the ‘‘forms of expression’’ of myths,tales, historical narratives, novels, autobiographies, songs, films, tele-vision reports or fictions, etc., in which in particular we find descriptionsof the internal states of other people to which we can have no directaccess and which by that fact nourish the imagination of spectators whenfaced with distant suffering.≥∞

Introduction 21

Once again it is precisely the imagination that fills the gap between selfand other; specifically, the imagination seems to finesse the require-ment that, on the one hand, the situation of the other be imaginable tothe self for its own habitation, and, on the other hand, that the situationof the other be beyond our lot. Once again, literature tests the condi-tions of each side of the coin, and I once again maintain the politicalramifications of this vacillation. I return to the mediation of the discur-sive and material systems that argue that they can ‘‘deliver’’ others to usin a less problematic fashion. Contemporary literature, read in the waysI will suggest and illustrate, says that it’s not that easy, these days. I willspecify a set of frames of reference, frames that seem to be neutral andnatural, disclosing a common ‘‘form’’ of all human beings. I examineliterary works of fiction to show how literature, read with specific ideasin mind, elaborates, extends, complicates, redefines, and sometimeseven explodes these common forms as it discloses the poetics andpolitics of the vacillation between self and other across and in thesedelivery systems.

In what follows I show how discursive ‘‘delivery systems’’ preciselyimagine relations between selves and others, and then how their rela-tively simple systems become less and less firm and stable as they inter-act with, and try to accommodate, a more radical sense of othernessproduced in contemporary historical contexts. For example, I considerhow, after all, one of the main things that is said to distinguish humanbeings from other living creatures is that we possess rationality, that is,that we can process the world and reflect on our place in it. Importantly,we can make choices informed by that rationality. So doesn’t ‘‘reason’’provide us with an empirically verifiable commonness, and aren’t ra-tional systems that work equally well for all people proof again of thatcommon ground? If we can bracket all those minor differences thatmight complicate the system—like history, culture, gender, race—thenwe should have a powerfully efficient way of talking to each other andnegotiating our preferences. But that pure formula for economic be-havior, which I take as my example here, becomes sorely tested whendifferent notions about rationality and reason start to compromise thatmodel, and that splitting apart is evident in the very world of languagesaturated with the voices of newly enfranchised others.

I examine the notion that all human behavior can be understoodaccording to notions of reason and rationality in chapter 1, ‘‘WhenOtherness Overcomes Reason.’’ In it I counterpose the powerful for-

22 Introduction

mula of ‘‘economic behavior’’ that we find in rational choice theory tothe history of literary realism, specifically as it has involved the incor-poration of new, diverse, ‘‘other’’ peoples. How have both our ideas ofrational choice and action and our modes of presenting them in litera-ture been disrupted by new populations? After providing a short discus-sion of rationality, rational choice, and literary realism, I move to adiscussion of how in his novel Elizabeth Costello J. M. Coetzee posesrationality and choice as the linchpins of the realist novel, then proceedsto methodically dismantle them, exposing them to ever increasing dosesof otherness, the otherness of the anti-aesthetic, the otherness of thenonhuman, the otherness of race. The paradox here is how literaturecan both present radical otherness and simultaneously be disarmed byit. Following up on the questions ‘‘How much otherness is required forliterature to have any traction at all, and how much pushes it over theedge?,’’ in this novel the answers to both are presented. The responseproffered by Elizabeth Costello puts into crisis not only literature, butalso literature’s ethical purpose (presenting the reader with othernessand thereby widening her or his moral scope). If in Elizabeth Costellothe specifics of history and politics are muted, taking a back seat to adiscussion of aesthetics and ethics, Coetzee’s explicitly historical andpolitical novel, Disgrace, echoes exactly these issues in its representationof and meditation on the new South Africa and the precise momentwhen the balance of power shifts toward newly enfranchised blacks.

In chapter 2, ‘‘Whose Story Is It?,’’ I turn to the family, writ both atthe local and national levels, and see what happens when strangers,particularly strangers of different races, enter and insinuate themselvesinto these domestic spaces, both forming a common bond and yetdestabilizing as well those alliances built into family structures. In thesemicrocommunal spaces we are formed and act as subjects; ‘‘family val-ues’’ are persistently alluded to for both the consensus they seem tobring forward from national audiences that hear them every electionyear, and the assumed transparency they evoke between the two scalesof social organization—what goes on in the family is a smaller version ofour national sense of belonging. But what happens when that commonground of empathy and cohesion is shot through with otherness, andthe family drawn into a destructive yet inevitable relation with thepolitical world in the public domain? In chapter 2 I offer a reading of asecond South African novel, Nadine Gordimer’s My Son’s Story, wherein

Introduction 23

the empathetic is split and fissured, demanded at multiple and contra-dictory levels, as the characters meditate on what holds new others tothemselves, and how familiar people, so similar to themselves, havebecome alienated from them. Politics, gender, sexuality, and race all actin concert to problematize this thing called coalition politics. In the end,it is art that takes on, perhaps reluctantly, the task of reunifying andconveying to the outside the new political world after apartheid.

The irony of My Son’s Story is that the story is told predominantlyfrom the point of view of the son, not the father. So why isn’t it titled,simply, My Story? Gordimer asks precisely these questions: how dostories circulate? Who takes ownership of them? How do they passthrough this otherness, and to what effect? The protagonists of thisnovel are drawn together, despite differences of gender, class, age, andrace, by three common interests, interests that are counterposed to eachother: that of the family (and, by extension, the national collective), thatof sexual desire, and that of the political (specifically, liberation poli-tics). The suppression and resurgence of difference under the force offamily loyalties, sexual desire, and liberation politics is presented viavery precise literary structure, language, and emplotment. I look care-fully at the ways Gordimer, in her public speeches, in her literary essays,and in this novel, outlines the hazards and necessity of crossing raciallines during this period of uncertain historical shift, what she calls,borrowing from Antonio Gramsci, ‘‘the interregnum.’’ It is precisely theperiod with which Coetzee is concerned in Disgrace. But I argue thatthe resolutions of the two novels are different in very important ways.Whereas Coetzee seems to give up on realism, as the new historicalcontext has eroded the foundations of such a concept, Gordimer’s skep-ticism gives way to a bifurcation of art and political action, assigningeach different roles.

My third example, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, comes from theworld of the body, and biotechnical and educational systems. Again, weall seem to have corporeal forms that are not radically different. There isenough commonness that medical students can use the same models tolearn the basic ways to diagnose and treat human bodies. But whathappens when the seemingly unbreachable ‘‘self ’’ of the individual hu-man body gets intruded on by another’s body, part of which is insertedinto one’s own for the sake of one’s very life? Here we are talking aboutorgan transplants, as well as the delivery system that sets up that point

24 Introduction

of exchange—the industry for organ harvesting, and the biotechnologi-cal, pharmaceutical, and medical systems that deliver an organ to itsnew body.

In chapter 3, ‘‘Art: A Foreign Exchange,’’ I critique Never Let Me Go,a sinister and morbid story of human cloning and unintended self-sacrifice. Parts of bodies are intermingled, organs harvested and re-planted in a radical and ethically problematic ‘‘encounter’’ with other-ness. This particular delivery system has immediate connections toboth life and death. I look at how historical changes in medical tech-nologies have changed the barriers between discrete bodies, and howthat technology opens up new understandings and imaginings of notonly being with other bodies, but also sharing bodies. I draw on medicalhistory and ethics, as well as the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy and hisremarkable essay on his own heart transplant, and compare its handlingof such concerns with that of Ishiguro’s novel. Yet even as we may beseduced by the novel’s wild and wrenching plotline, and its seemingartlessness (it is presented as simply the remembrances of a schoolgirl),it turns out that Art is everything. It is both the sign of humanness and atoken of redemption.

Ishiguro himself makes this point, time and again, in his remarks onthe novel; for him, the story he tells in the novel presents not an apoca-lyptic picture of an inhuman and dehumanizing brave new world, butrather an argument that art can save us from even the worst horrorimaginable. I account for this discrepancy by bringing to the fore onekey idea found in both the novel and in Ishiguro’s pronouncements onits composition—the idea of the contingency of history, and the ways inwhich such contingency informs what we call ‘‘moral luck.’’ Ishiguro’sfamous notion is that there are no bad people, only people born with anethical system out of step with their historical age. I use Never Let Me Goto explore this notion and the moral conundrum it offers. And just asin Coetzee and Gordimer, the deliverance of others is contingent onhistory; where in the latter cases this involved the rupture in apart-heid, in Ishiguro it involves biomedical breakthroughs. In each instance,interaction with others is radically altered, and ethical choices are putinto crisis.

This focus on art becomes more complicated in chapter 4, ‘‘PacificOceanic Feeling: Affect, Otherness, Mediation.’’ The source text for thischapter is the novel My Year of Meats, by the Japanese American author

Introduction 25

and filmmaker Ruth Ozeki. I tackle the issue of mass communicationand advertising, tracing how their particular schematizations of literacy,desire, need, and behavior may be read in cross-cultural and genderedmanners, seeing how emotions and affect are wielded trans-Pacifically. Ishow in particular how Ozeki’s novel and her film, Body of Correspon-dence, share common concerns about affect and media. If we largelyknow the world via mass media, how do the various delivery systems ofliterature and television interact with the economic? In My Year ofMeats, the economic is explicitly set forward in long disquisitions aboutthe meat industry and pharmaceuticals, and I connect Ozeki’s concernwith the transnational Body that ingests these commonly circulatingand affecting materials to Ishiguro’s poetics and ethics of the body. Iplace the penultimate phrase of Ozeki’s novel, ‘‘that is the modern thingto do,’’ into strict scrutiny as a way to reflect back on all of the chapters ofthis study—what is the status of the modern, of the realist novel, of thepre-parcelized human body in today’s world and, specifically, in today’sliterature? How can we retain, or restore even, a sense of ethics that bothrespects otherness and understands its complex residence in ‘‘commonground’’? How can we then reimagine our own place there? In theconclusion I elaborate the question of contemporary forms of com-munication and make the case that it is a reading practice that can besthelp us maintain a critical eye toward the discursive production of‘‘sameness’’ and ‘‘otherness,’’ and the consequences thereof.

Let me here briefly allude to the essay that I treat at length in chapter3, Jean-Luc Nancy’s ‘‘The Intruder.’’ In this essay, Nancy begins byremarking on how he owes his very life to the fact that when his heartfailed, medical science had opened up a ‘‘slot’’ of technological possibili-ties that included life-saving transplant techniques: ‘‘Less than twentyyears ago, one didn’t graft, especially not with the use of cyclosporin,which protects against the rejection of the graft. Twenty years from now,it will certainly be a matter of another sort of graft, with other methods.A personal contingency thus crosses a contingency in the history oftechniques. In an earlier age, ‘I’ would be dead; in the future, I would bea survivor by some other means. But always, ‘I’ finds itself tightly packedinto a narrow slot of technical possibilities.’’≥≤

In this volume I look at precisely the slot that is opened at a particularmoment in South African political history, that liminal period that sawblacks and whites draw together in ways that put unprecedented pres-

26 Introduction

sure on racial, political, and family loyalties, of inherited notions of ‘‘us’’and ‘‘them.’’ Coetzee parallels that historical moment by looking at thetectonic shift that is created by conceptually and ethically displacing theanimal-human binary, wherein the ‘‘nonhuman,’’ marked by its lack ofreason, becomes less and less alien, and the possession of ‘‘reason’’ amore and more problematic definition of humankind. Gordimer’s textlooks at how that same moment in South African history affected no-tions of gender, sexuality, and the family, as the barriers between blackand white, public and private, opened up. In Ishiguro and Nancy, bio-technology and bioeconomies come to open up the heretofore sacro-sanct human body to synthetic (re)production and commodification;within this ‘‘slot,’’ new possibilities of human trading in otherness, nowconverted to sameness, takes place unfettered by ethics and barely rep-resentable in the literary imagination. Finally, Ozeki’s text places us inan era wherein affect is delivered globally via new hybrid media thatbreach the barriers between private and public, information and enter-tainment, text and image and sound. Given the ‘‘information age,’’ whatkind of glossy screen flattens our senses of dimension, depth, characterinto eminently substitutable data? How does the common digital de-nominator slot us into software-guided ‘‘social networks’’?

Fundamentally, I am drawn back to this question: if literary narrativescan still help us imagine others across global discourses regarding thecommonly held properties of human beings (the mind, the heart, andthe body), can they also exceed the ways those specific modes deter-mine the shape and form of understanding, and, if so, does that offer usany greater or more potent way of not only imagining, but also thinkingthrough being together in the world? How can we see both ‘‘others’’ andourselves differently, in ways that live up to the promise and rationalefor reading literature, at all? In that sense, we come back to and remainwith the idea that literature itself is a kind of otherness, something thatis, as George Eliot says, the ‘‘closest thing to life,’’ but not life itself. It isprecisely that empathetic, imaginative, and critical relation to that thingoutside itself that literature rehearses and models for our own selves.

Notes

Preface

1. See Jim Vallette, ‘‘Larry Summers’ War against the Earth,’’ 15 June 1999,counterpunch, http://www.counterpunch.org/.

2. Ibid.3. Ibid.4. For a rebuttal to this rationale, see Joseph E. Stiglitz, ‘‘Terrorism: There’s

No Futures in It,’’ Los Angeles Times, 31 July 2003, B13.5. San Francisco Chronicle, 30 August 2003.6. ‘‘Terrorism Futures Market Plan Canceled,’’ 29 July 2003, Fox News, http://

www.foxnews.com/.7. These events led me to organize a conference on rational choice theory

and the humanities, the papers of which are collected in ‘‘States of Welfare,’’ ed.Lauren M. E. Goodlad, Bruce Robbins, and Michael Rothberg, special issue ofOccasion 2 (20 December 2010), which is available online at http://arcade.stanford.edu/. For more on the imagination, war, and terror, see my ‘‘Pre-emption, Perpetual War, and the Future of the Imagination.’’

Introduction

1. Huntington, ‘‘The United States,’’ 76–77.2. Ibid., 64.3. Ibid., 1124. Ibid., 115.5. Sorensen, ‘‘Self-Strengthening Empathy,’’ 75.6. Wimsatt and Brooks, Literary Criticism, 59.7. Ibid., 25.8. Ibid., 27.9. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 3–4.10. Ibid., 7.

198 Notes to Chapter One

11. Ibid., 24.12. Ibid., 23.13. Ibid., 25.14. Santayana, Three Philosophical Poets, 5. Quoted in Booth, The Company

We Keep, 257.15. Eliot, Impressions of Theophrastus Such, 276–77.16. In the next chapter I’ll show how Smith’s notion of moral sentiment is not

conventional in the sense of a simple interest in reproducing norms of senti-ment. Smith also considers the imaginative leap outside the actual that can befound after one has sensed commonality.

17. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 5.18. Ibid.19. Booth, The Company We Keep, 223.20. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice, 111.21. Booth, The Company We Keep, 70.22. Ibid., 488.23. Sennett, Respect in a World of Inequality, 52.24. Ibid., 52–53.25. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 7.26. Ibid., 33.27. Ibid., 24.28. Ibid., 38.29. Here he refers to Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments (Oxford: Clarendon,

1982), 31.30. See Piper, ‘‘Impartiality, Compassion, and Modal Imagination.’’31. Boltanski, Distant Suffering, 50–51.32. Nancy, L’intrus, 14. My translation.

Chapter 1: When Otherness Overcomes Reason

1. Gary Becker, The Economic Approach to Human Behavior, 8.2. Abell, ‘‘Sociological Theory and Rational Choice Theory,’’ 252.3. Elster, ‘‘The Nature and Scope of Rational-Choice Explanation,’’ 71.4. Ibid.5. Barthes, ‘‘The Reality Effect,’’ 142. In the course of his essay Barthes argues

for the importance of precisely these digressions, delays, changes of direction,surprises, and incidental details.

6. Hastie and Dawes, Rational Choice in an Uncertain World, 91, emphasisadded.

7. Ibid., 134.8. Ibid., 111.9. Ibid., 112.